Re: Further work on volpack (Was: License of volpack)

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Phil Lacroute wrote:
> I'm really sorry for letting this fall through the cracks.  So, the current situation
> is:
>
> 1) We've agreed to the BSD license.  If this is the main stumbling block I can put a
> version of the package on the Stanford web site with the new licensing terms very
> quickly.
>
> 2) I'm not entirely happy with the new build procedure since it doesn't work 
> on the environment I use every day, and I haven't had a whole lot of time to 
> look into it.

What kind of environment are aou using?
Just send me the error message and we'll have a look into it.

> I haven't looked at the GNU build tools in a long time so 
> there's a bit of a learning curve to figure out the issues.  I need to get up 
> to speed on it anyway for an unrelated software package that I'm working on, 
> but I've had some other priorities and that's why it has taken forever.  What 
> are the requirements you have that resulted in changing the build system?  If 
> I understand correctly the main thing is that you want to build shared 
> libraries.  Were there other issues?

Well, we need to build shared and static libraries from a library package.
The best way to do so that _I_ know are the GNU building tools - probably
there are other ways but I did not observed a problem in the past.  So you
might test our promise to solve you problem before you spend much time into
starting something from scratch.

> 3) I'm unclear on how Debian-Med is distributed

Debian-Med is an internal Debian project and distributes as such with
main stream Debian.

> and whether there is any 
> possibility that you could distribute a debian-specific version of volpack 
> that has your changes

This is perfectly possible, but ...

> so you can decouple from what's on the Stanford web site.

... it's never a good idea to maintain a large patch with diffs from
upstream.  The rules for Debian maintainers urge them to give back their
changes (for the profit of both sides).

> Then you wouldn't have to wait for me to figure out the build issues. 
> Is that possible?

So it is definitely possible but not really the way I would prefer.  We
should finally find a build system that works on your side and builds
dynamical any statical libraries.  It is finally your decision which
way to go, but if we could be helpful to speed up this finding process -
just tell us.

Kind regards

      Andreas.

PS: I hope there is no problem in posting your mail to a public list.
    As I always said: We are a group of interested people, several more
    competent than me.  So please try to keep these people informed.
--
http://fam-tille.de